Kaleo's been living on a shoestring in Hawaii with his uncle since his parents failed to return from the Bermuda Triangle. But when the shoestring threatens to snap, Kaleo must use his unique talents and his knowledge of Hawaiian culture to team up with a foreign friend to try for the big prize in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Specifications

• Second-year Chinese reader
• 375 unique characters, 250 headwords
• 84 pages of text ( = 42 for the story, in two versions)
• simplified characters and pinyin
• pinyin appears on the following page, coordinated with the previous page's characters, but is not visible during reading of characters
• aspects of Chinese, American and traditional Hawaiian culture
• contains a glossary Chinese-English

Information for teachers

Written in simple Chinese, the book is suitable for learners in the second year, and focuses on repetition of the most frequent words and characters in the language. The entire story contains just 375 unique words, with “he” and “his” considered to be two words, for example. Names are written in latin alphabet. A full glossary is included at the end of the story to ensure that the text is comprehensible to all readers.

Find out more about teaching Chinese through novels and comprehensible input at Terry Waltz's blog and Ignite Language.